Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) is commonly used within the field of electronic chip manufacturing for the purposes of testing electronic components. ATE systems both reduce the amount of time spent on testing devices to ensure that the device functions as designed and serve as a diagnostic tool to determine the presence of faulty components within a given device before it reaches the consumer.
ATE systems can perform a number of test functions on a device under test (DUT) through the use of test signals transmitted to and from the DUT. As depicted in prior art FIG. 1, conventional ATE systems are very complex electronic systems and generally include use of a load board, such as load board 100. Load board 100 is a highly specialized and customized printed circuit board (PCB). The load board 100 is designed to interface with a customer's DUT and interface with a test head (not pictured) of a production integrated circuit tester system for testing the DUT. The DUT is generally secured to a socket within the physically large PCB.
Load board 100 contains specialized traces within the PCB that lead to the DUT I/O pins (to the socket) and to specialized pin interface regions of the PCB (e.g., pogo pin interface blocks 100a) which contain pads that make physical connections to interfaces of the test head via pogo pins located on the test head. In this fashion, the test head can directly interface with the load board to test the DUT. The locations of these pogo pin interface blocks and their connections to the socket that hold the DUT are customized to the DUT and are complex. If there are any errors in either the placement of the pads, the arrangement of the signal pins on the pads, or their connections to the sockets or the traces between the socket and the pogo pin interface blocks, an entirely new and corrected load board must be designed and manufactured, which can take several months. Moreover, due to the large trace routing of the PCB, corrected load boards can often be expensive to produce. Therefore, it is not convenient when load board errors are discovered and very costly to correct.